Sarah Palin’s Challenge — Our Instinctive Biases

When faced with a new piece of information, we filter the item through our own internal biases in an attempt to make sense of it. The recent Vice Presidential choices of Barack Obama and John McCain gave me an interesting illustrative example. When Barack announced Joe Biden, the conversation was about Biden’s experience, his voting […]

A Little Irony

This doesn’t really have anything to do with advertising — at least not directly — but my wife just alerted me to the fact that the man who co-wrote the best-selling travel guide 100 Things To Do Before You Die has died at the age of 47. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest […]

Using Viral Video: What Do You Want to Accomplish?

My colleague Adam Orth recently handed me Ken Wheaton’s Advertising Age column about Extended Stay Hotels. The column concerns a video, allegedly authorized by the client, in which an attractive woman licks pretty much everything in a hotel room — including the toilet. This apparently is intended to demonstrate that Extended Stay Hotel rooms are […]

Should You Click an Ad to “Support” a Blog?

Interesting discussion happening in the Comments field at TechSoapbox. It was prompted by a post on Seth Godin’s blog that reads, in part: If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You […]

An Interesting Way to Beat Call Reluctance

Those of us who use cold calling as part of our marketing arsenal sometimes run into call reluctance — we just can’t bring ourselves to pick up the phone and call a complete stranger. Afterwards, when we’ve gotten the meeting, fear of rejection stops us from asking for the order. Chris Sparhawk, an amateur advice-giver […]